Epitaph For A Tramp

  “But even with that,” she said then, “even with that, my God, do you think I wanted to do what I did? Do you think I meant to do it? Can you imagine how I feel, what I’ve gone through since it happened? I almost started to tell you this morning when I mentioned what happened with Robert Bell but I couldn’t, I was afraid. And then later I even called your apartment but the police officer answered and I couldn’t even ask if you were there. And then when you came in before and said that you believed someone else had done it, and that the person was dead, I thought no one would ever know, I thought I wouldn’t

  have to say anything at all. Because I... Oh, God, I didn’t mean to kill her, I didn’t! But when she said that to me about going to you, to you..”

  Her voice dropped again. “You,” she repeated. It was almost a whisper. “Yes, Harry, you were a part of it. Not just the contempt I thought I heard in Catherine’s voice, not just the fact that she could get any man she wanted, but that she could still get you. From the first time I saw you I’ve thought about you, I’ve died a thousand times since you and she separated, hoping that through some impossible chance, some miracle, you and I might, that you and I... And then after all that happened she was going back to you, was telling me that you’d take her, and...”

  She looked up at me then. Her face was like something sketched in charcoal on coarse gray paper and then abandoned in the rain. A shudder ran through her.

  “All those years without anyone, all those years. Do you have any idea what it was? Can you know? There hasn’t been anyone, not anyone else in all that time. After Robert Bell I couldn’t, not for years, and then there wasn’t any chance. Do I have to tell you how I once let myself get picked up by a soldier and let him take me into an alleyway—into an alley, Harry, in that filth, that stench—just to see if I were still capable of being a woman, if I could feel anything at all! And then just now with you, Harry, with you! Can you have any idea what that was for me? Can you? Even lying here with all the horror in my mind, all the horror! Oh, my God, I did it, yes, I killed Catherine! Call the police, do what you must! But hold me first, Harry! Hold me again! Harry, please, again, again!”

  She had flung herself toward me. Her arms leaped around my neck and she was tearing at me, trying to drag me across herself with all the fierce, dead weight of her sick agony. Her breath was coming in wild sobs and her voice was choked and pleading. “Harry, yes, tell them, do! But not now! Please, oh, God, later! Stay with me now! Don’t leave me yet, Harry, don’t!”

  Her head snapped upward viciously when I jerked away. For a moment she hung there, poised on her knees at the bed’s edge with her arms outstretched and her breasts lifted like some doomed heathen priestess waiting in the twilight to be sacrificed. Then she collapsed in a heap, whimpering.

  I stood there biting the knuckles of my right hand until I tasted blood.

  I went into the bathroom and got dressed. When I came out again she was lying on her back with her face turned away. She hardly seemed to be breathing at all, and the sheet was twisted and crushed about her loins. It might have been the remnant of a shroud in a violated grave.

  The tiny shaft of sunlight through the blind had shifted a little, and my watch said 3:29.1 stood there by the bed, staring down at her and not saying anything, and I waited the minute.

  The phone felt as cold as a new Colt automatic in my hand. I put it to my head and dialed Brannigan.